nerv bae wrote:But (admittedly without reflecting on it at all) I don't see how those affects are an analog to something real, either absolutely or relative to the world-rewrite, and I don't see this addressed in the rest of your post. Can you expand on this?
It's kind of what I was getting at later on by referring to my dislike of Gendo's redemption, and how it operates, and how it feels unhinged from how this kind of dynamic can resolve in life. I feel like that's the lynchpin, and my elaboration will get a little abstract but eventually return to the absurdity of Gendo's function as I see it:
Shinji's reality is set to rights because he confronts the overarching evil responsible for bad things; he undoes the self-administered grip Gendo has on himself that has caused pain across the entire globe, and his self-administered solution (understanding, empathy, forgiveness, recognition of the self in the other after a wedge has for far too long been cemented there) is a solution which applies on a universal scale to everyone. Maybe if we take everything in Shin as allegory for a very specific, very individual mental block and incapability of extending grace toward others because it has a vice-grip on you and you fixate on it at the expense of all else--there's where I can draw a connection between what's being displayed and something real. But it's not an elegant allegory and it feels like too many elements are worse than unimportant.
On a literal level, Gendo is the capital E force of evil for the entire globe, but the way he's redeemed doesn't fit the context. Evil, much less discomfort, can't be fixed with This One Solution Evildoers Hate. And it really chafes me that all sense of potential discomfort is scrubbed out of the tone of the narrative for the last couple minutes, no indication whatsoever that what happened wasn't "everything is good forever now, the end." All the worse because NTE's lens spent too much time on raunch and romp and didn't let it linger on anything that would get across, in a genuine way, the actual implications of the destruction Gendo is supposed to have unleashed. Neither evil deeds nor their solution get examined beyond the level of known fact. There's a responsibility (as I see it, at least) to do justice to the severity waved around on-screen that feels totally waived, and it's done so without justification; it's drawing carnage on screen just to get that across real quick, as if there might as well have been a flash of text reading Murder & Destruction, without showing the actual human fallout. While we have clearly traumatized characters and hardship-hardened ones--eg, we get Hikari crying into a stern Toji as the sky swirls, we get an angry Midori and Sakura--we don't get more than these brief demonstrations or single-sentence explanations. We see them snap, but they tell us why they're snapping as they snap. They don't get any build-up that immerses the audience into the reality of the situation ahead of time.
But far more than that, I don't just mean the lack of characters believably distraught, I mean there's a general lack of believability to the function of Gendou as a villain in a logistical sense. Real-life figures who go to the top of a hierarchy and can be said to be hugely responsible aren't the
sole arbiters, pretty much ever. They're a byproduct of a culture, if you snipe them out their torch will be carried on, there's deeper roots that reach from them into society and back and those roots are not wrapped up and entirely contained inside of them as a single, super-important self-propelling individual, otherwise they would wither. Gendo is the
only negative force, all other countries have been disposed of, Seele has been shut off, and his second-hand man is working out of his own totally individualistic motivation that merely aligns enough with Gendo's purposes. Nothing operates like this. Not unless you take Gendo as allegory to some kind of extremely insular, solipsistic mental dynamic, reducing everything down to being a passion play of Shinji's mind. But this is unsatisfying, too, because all I can think of at the end of Thrice is, "okay, that's all resolved now, inner mental block dissolved--now what?" Thrice is so unconcerned with exploring the nuances of what might have all been an internal complex that I can't fathom anything interesting or nuanced out there in the new externality it presents. Its hybrid live-action, 2D, CGI cityscape feels like it must be empty. Contrast that to NGE and EoE, and you don't have this rampant, absurd shrinking of everything down to a palmful of characters--not until reality itself is involuted, and that's a far more elegant approach (external is turned inward, reality is turned unreality). Prior to that, you have Gendo actually
struggling against anything at all, countries still exist, Seele is acting as outside forces do in life--often contrary to our desires or needs. And even then, they and world governments find themselves scrambling too and have to concede with contingencies.
Unlike Eva's being quantum'd away, I don't feel like there's anything in reality that can be removed in an
ontological sense ala Thrice. Closest I can come up with is it's meta for Anno moving on from Evangelion the franchise, but it's inelegant because he's not doing anything close to erasure irl, as there's still the multimedia empire he spearheads. I don't put much stock in it, but many fans take it as a "move on from Eva" message, but I don't see the point of moving on from deeply moving art, which is what I take EoE to be; why is maturity never watching something you like ever again? Aren't they releasing a bluray eventually? Do we move on after
that? I find there to be more stock in the idea that it's more exactly referring to some kind of co-dependent relationship some subset of fans have, but if that's truly the message, said media empire is enabling it anyway, so what's the deal? Compare that to EoE, which by way of destruction and rebirth analogy is merely suggesting an acceptance and open engagement with the cycle of pain and joy that is clearly how life operates, our stirring brains, their moods, mental pits and peaks. It's a novel use of a sci-fi conceit to deliver, at the same time, a story of growth and a suggestion that a person's insular pain can also be a tool for understanding others. But what's the loaded meaning of the Anti-Universe? Closest thing I can come up with is it's a meta reference to film itself, and just like how it allows Gendo to communicate to Shinji without pretense (and yet, paradoxically, with unrelenting pretense, as any possible imagery can be conjured and is), it allows Anno to say what he wants unfiltered without the obligations of storytelling convention. Unfortunately, nothing he says feels novel or like it
requires this kind of expository collage. EoE's imagery cacophony, the mental breakdown self-talk, the rhapsodizing Shinji does with Rei, all feel like internal monologues--they feel insular in the same way thought does. So does NGE's last 2 episodes. I can't say that for Thrice, where the talk is restrictive instead of wandering and open, and Shinji's recommendations of attitude and administered epiphany feel declarative; the characters when they extrapolate (the ones that get to, as Asuka is instead jettisoned in stunned silence) seem like they're reaching permanent, unalterable summits. It almost feels like Thrice is proudly presenting what it thinks is an unheralded new formulation of philosophical remedy the likes of Descartes failed to uncover, when what Anno actually cooked up are garden variety nostrums. And I find that these gestures of finality are the most off-base of all, because of course, nothing in life is final. EoE gives me a feeling like I'm at the base of a mountain when it ends, but Thrice seems like it wants to shut my mind up and force a kind of mental place it deems "not to be questioned," and in that I find there to be a bankruptcy of truth.
Perhaps you could frame things in NGE and EoE as inelegant and NTE in an elegant way where the allegory makes sense and there aren't useless elements taking up space. But how I feel when I watch is that what I see on screen with EoE is direct and can be related to something readily experienced daily, and that NTE is strained and presenting things that either feel false or aren't established or reasoned enough, or are purely fantasy in an ideological sense.
nerv bae wrote:I recall you have a creative writing background. Out of curiosity, does your group of IRL Eva fans share it? I'm trying to figure out if the Thrice-is-painful attitude clusters by background, or comes from across the spectrum.
Nope, my friends are all STEM.